CA 06: Home of a crazy woman, and the crazy homeless

We started the day in San Jose, at the Winchester house. We were there before the doors opened, and went on the first tour with a very small group. It was exactly what I expected. Tacky but fun. We only did the basic tour, not the behind the scenes part. My favorite part was the earthquake damaged part of the building. The juxtaposition of the walls with cracked or missing plaster, with still intact Tiffany glass windows was fantastic. For some reason the whole building reminded me of both the Turn of the Screw and the Haunting of Hill House.

After leaving the house, we went back up to San Francisco, and boarded a boat to Angel Island. our goal was the top of the hill, but we also wanted to take our time... the trail to the top switchbacks a million times. It wound through a forest with a floor covered in knee high plants with small blue blossoms. It was beautiful. finally the trail broke out through the trees and we thought we had a chance of reaching the summit before we had to turn back to make the return ferry. But the switchbacks deceived us yet again, and we had to turn around shy of the top. Then we had to wait 20 minutes on the ferry while they tried to find a man who had gone looking for his children, to round up for the ferry. The kids were on time.

After this we headed to the Barbary coast trail, excited at the prospect of spending the evening walking through the city. We parked at a parking garage, and headed out to find the first of the markers. Immediately upon leaving the garage, a guy came up and tried to stop me on the sidewalk. I put my eyes on my feet and dodged around him, but he caught up with Jake. "Hey Hey Hey, what's up?" he says, holding his arms out wide, palm up, non threatening, but still blocking Jake's way. Jake sidesteps and we hurry on our way. We reach a trolley, with a very long line waiting to ride, and opt to walk along beside it instead. Further up the street, a crazy man in a dress is hollering gibberish, and spinning, arms out, down the sidewalk. Another man grabs my arm to stop us, and ask for money. At this point, we are disliking more and more the idea of continuing the walk, so we stop at a booth in union square to see about a tour, but they are closed or full... we wander down an escalator at one point, and are accosted by a woman, standing directly at the bottom, holding out a jar, and preaching nonsense. we finally get back on track with the trail, and head into china town. China town has no homeless people, at least none that get right in your face, or grab onto you, and feels a lot safer, but the sun is setting, the shops seem to be closing up, and I was not relishing the thought of returning the way we'd come after dark. So, rather than continue the trail, we headed back to the car, a little dejected. Still, I liked the city, and I felt that earlier in the day, surely, there wouldn't have been as much concern. This is probably the largest U.S. city I've actually footed around, but I have never met with homeless people so brazen. People which are not just homeless, but truly beggars, offering nothing for the money they want, save one man, who was doing a very good mime atop a crate... anyway, so we didn't end on a totally bad not. We did stop in at a restaurant on the way back to the car, and had some pretty good steaks. Finally, we returned to the car, went to the hotel, and the next morning, after a fine breakfast at I-hop, we caught our plane home.

Remnants at Paestum

After were were too tired to walk any more at Pompeii, we got back to our car and headed to the city of Paestum. We arrived in the early evening at our destination, the ruined city of Paestum. Paestum began as a Greek city, and eventually came into roman hands. It was eventually abandoned, possibly due to malarial infection. The main attraction are the 3 well preserved temples, belonging to Hera, Apollo, and Athena. Amongst the temples are other excavated ruins of the city, including a small amphitheater and a roman amphitheater

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We spent some time wandering around the temples, reading what little I was able to find on the Internet of the cities history.

My own backyard of Nashville has a replica of the Parthenon in Greece, and these temples are after the same fashion. It is known as Doric, and can be distinguished from other Greek styles (Ionic and Corinthian) by the fat columns with unembellished capitols.

As the sun began to set, it was time for us to find out hotel.

Our Hotel for the night was Hotel Zi Carmela. The first problem we had was that we couldn't find the place. This was because the street name we had was not the name of the street anymore. It is, however, the only major cross street in the city. I don't wish to go into the details, but we wasted quite a bit of time trying to locate this place. Once there, we decided to eat at the hotel, which was serving a prix fix meal, rather than go out to a restaurant. A prix fix meal simply means that they will serve several pre determined courses. sometimes there is a choice between 2 or even 3 prix fix options, but often, there is only one, as was the case at this hotel. However, being that a) we didn't really speak Italian, and they really didn't speak English b) it was a sea side resort town and c) I have a hard time eating most sea food... It was a very poor decision on our part.

The first thing served was some sort of potato crab cake. These were good, and I didn't notice the seafood in it really. We were served with a bottle of dry white table wine (a type I hate) and sparkling water (which is bitter and not my favorite). Then they brought out fresh slices of tomato with slices of cheese. Jake liked this, but it wasn't for me. Then there was pasta with some sort of sea food. I picked at this and began to feel sick. Finally they brought out a plate of what I can only describe as raw fish pieces. There was definitely a tentacle in there. I gave up all pretense at this part and left the table to go back to our room, leaving Jake to finish the meal, and the bottle of wine, alone. What's more is I'm sure we made a very bad impression on them.

As a special bonus for reading all that, here's some photos I left out of my blog about Pompeii. 1 is of the colonnade at the boy's school, and the other is of the unusual amphitheater style with external steps.